I’m working on an addon for Anki that will do the following things for deck options that you select:

  • Set starting ease factor of cards to the average ease factor of cards with intervals > 90 days
  • Adjust the interval modifier to try to hit your selected success rate (80%, 90%, etc.)
  • Adjust the graduating interval and easy interval to hit your selected success rate for the deck options
  • Adjust the easy bonus to hit your desired success rate
  • Adjust your new interval % to hit your desired success rate after a lapse

So basically, adjust a bunch of numbers in the deck options to try to hit your target success rate during reviews.

Anki tends to define a card as mature if its interval is greater than 20 days. If your interval modifier or starting ease factor is large (because your cards are relatively easy), then 20 days might not represent a very mature card. I upped my definition of mature to 90 days for this addon.

Code mostly done

I actually have pretty much all the code done, but it’s wrapped up in an addon that I wrote that does quite a few other things.

It’s a bit of a mess. I just need to pull out these particular auto-adjust features, put them in a separate addon, and clean them up a bit.

Danger, there be dragons ahead

The algorithms the code uses to estimate the correct interval modifiers can suggest huge modifiers if your current success rate is at or near 100%. This can happen when you first start a deck that’s pretty easy for you.

I put in a safety margin. The maximum change will be 20%. But still, even with this safety margin, it’s possible for the addon to really screw things up for you if you don’t pay attention to what it’s doing.

In one of my deck options, the modifier got so big that it isn’t readable in Anki’s gui. I actually think this is an appropriate modifier; that particular deck is full of cards that are pretty darn easy for me. So I added another routine. If the modifier gets above 7, we multiply the ease factor of all the cards by the interval modifier and then set the interval modifier to 1.

All Greek to you?

If this all sounds like gibberish, I’m not surprised. The inner workings of Anki aren’t well known by most users. When I do get around to releasing the addon, I’ll make a write-up of the hows and whys behind what the addon does.

But because I think you need to have a firm grasp of how Anki works, and what the addon does, I’ll probably only release it on github; no easy-peasy ankiweb download for this one.